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FROM EUBB TO 6ISHQ: THE DEVELOPMENT

OF LOVE IN EARLY SUFISM

JO S E PH E . B . L UM B ARDBrandeis University

1 I N TR O DU C TIO N

Love has been an integral component of Sufism from the second centuryah until today. Scholars such as Louis Massignon,1 Helmut Ritter,2

Annemarie Schimmel,3 William Chittick,4 and Carl Ernst5 have providedin-depth accounts of the teachings on love in both the early and middleIslamic periods. Most recently, Benyamin Abrahamov has chronicled theteachings on love in the works of Ab< E:mid al-Ghaz:l; (d. 505/1111)

1 The teachings of various Sufis on love are examined by Massignon in bothThe Passion of al-Eall:j: Mystic and Martyr in Islam, trans. Herbert Mason(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Essay on the Origins of theTechnical Language of Islamic Mysticism, trans. Benjamin Clark (South Bend:University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

2 Helmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul, trans. John OKane (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 2003).

3 Annemarrie Schimmel, Mystical Dimension of Islam (Chapel Hill: TheUniversity of North Carolina Press, 1975); id., Eros-Heavenly and not so

Heavenly in 4

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observes: The Path of Love may be described as a loosely affiliatedgroup of4

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literary traditions cross-fertilized with those in the Sufi tradition, a fullcomparison of these teachings is beyond the scope of this study.

The first Sufi text in which a full metaphysics of love is expressed isthe masterful Saw:niA of Shaykh AAmad al-Ghaz:l; (d. 517/1126 or

520/1111), the younger brother of the famous Ab< E:mid al-Ghaz:l;(d. 505/1111). Whereas Ab< E:mid had a distinguished career injurisprudence (fiqh) and theology (kal:m), and came to be recognized asone of the most influential thinkers in Islamic history, AAmad devotedhimself to the Sufi path, focusing all of his efforts upon the purification ofthe heart through spiritual realization. Written in Persian in the year 508/1114, the Saw:niA presents all of reality as an unfolding of love (6ishq)through the complex interrelations of loverness (6:shiq;) and belovedness(ma6sh

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Who comes to Thee.

O my Hope and my Rest and my Delight,

The heart can love none other than Thee.13

And,

Two loves I give Thee, love that yearns,

And love because Thy due is love.

My yearning my remembrance turns

To Thee, nor lets it from Thee rove.14

The sentiment that God alone is worthy of love is echoed throughoutthe literature of early Sufism. Figures such as the famous Ab< Bakr al-Shibl; (d. 334/945), who was known for his teachings on love,15 spoke oflove (maAabba) as a fire in the heart, consuming all save the will of the

Beloved,16 or as that which erases all that is other than God from theheart,17 and thus considered mystical love as an intense desire centringones spiritual aspiration (himma) on God alone and cutting one off fromall that is other than the Divine. In contrast, AAmad al-Ghaz:l; made6ishq the center of an intellectual discourse on the nature of reality andthe stages of the Sufi path, discussing all aspects of creation and ofspiritual wayfaring in terms of6ishq. Whereas previous Sufis, such as thefamous al-Eusayn b. ManB

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As will be demonstrated below, the ideas most similar to those ofAAmad al-Ghaz:l; are found in accounts of al-Eall:js teachings on lovetransmitted by Ab

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This ontological relationship, however, is not the focus of the Saw:niA,nor of any of AAmad al-Ghaz:l;s writings or sermons. He does not writeas a theologian, theosophist, philosopher or Sufi theoretician. Rather,he is first and foremost a spiritual guide. From his perspective, it is not

so important where and how things have come into being, what isimportant to know is that for the spiritual wayfarer his being andattributes are themselves the provision of the (spiritual) path.20 As such,AAmad al-Ghaz:l; always focuses upon the path of wayfaring by whichthe loverthe spiritual adept or seekerascends through the belovedthe God of beliefsto be annihilated in the ocean of Lovethe DivineEssence.

The soteriological relationship is expressed in the Qur8:nic verse 5. 54,He loves them and they love Him, which al-Ghaz:l; mentions several

times in his sermons, cites in his D:st:n-i murgh:n Treatise of the birdsand al-Tajr;d f; kalimat al-tawA;d, and with which he begins hisSaw:niA. As love is the true essence of all creation, the realization of loveis neither an emotion nor a sentiment, but the natural response of onesbeing to God, and its locus is the heart: The function of the heart is beinga lover. So long as there is no love, it has no function. When it becomesa lover its affair will also become ready. Therefore, it is certain that theheart has been created for love and being a lover and knows nothingelse.21 In the Saw:niA, he presents the spiritual path as a subtle interplay

of love in which the spiritual seeker is a lover who comes to realize histrue identity as a locus for the beloveds love of himself. Here the Sufipath is envisaged as degrees of love wherein one ultimately transcendsthe duality of lover and beloved to arrive at the pure essence of LoveItself. The beloved is not the Absolute, as in the poetry and prose of theprevious Sufis, rather the beloved is here considered to be the God ofbeliefs that serves as a locus of spiritual aspiration for one travelling the

extant apparatus. Rabb:n;s edition does not provide a critical apparatus, but in

several instances Rabb:n; provides readings that make more sense then thoseof Pourjavady or Ritter. For this study I will therefore rely upon the editions ofPourjavady, Ritter, and Rabb:n;. They will be cited in this order and thediscrepancies in the paragraph order will be noted by placing the paragraphnumber in parenthesis after each citation. In order to maintain consistency intechnical vocabulary, all translations are my own, except when the page numbersfor Pourjavadys translation are in bold. In re-rendering the Saw:niA, I a mindebted to Pourjavadys translation for guidance.

20 AAmad al-Ghaz:l;, Saw:niA, ed. Pourjavady, 32, (trans., 54) (39);ed. Ritter, 60 (39); ed. Rabb:n;, 181 (38).

21 AAmad al-Ghaz:l;, Saw:niA, ed. Pourjavady, 45 (48), (trans., 62);ed. Ritter, 73 (44); ed. Rabb:n;, 189 (53).

T H E D E V E L O P M EN T O F L O V E I N E A R L Y S U F I S M 351

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path, but must be transcended in order to advance to the Divine Essencefrom which both the lover and the beloved are derived. As Shaykhal-Ghaz:l; writes: . . . the derivation of the lover and the beloved is fromLove. When the accidentalities of derivations arise, the affair is again

dissolved in the oneness of its reality.22

In the beginning of the spiritual path, the wayfarer must be severedfrom all of creation such that he becomes a true lover, desiring nonebut the beloved and having intimacy with him alone. According toal-Ghaz:l;, the desire for just one hair of creation will prevent him fromfully realizing his identity as lover. At the culmination of this stage, thelover comes to see the loveliness of the beloved in all things, for herealizes the inner face of beauty which is turned towards the beloved,rather that the outer face of ugliness turned towards creation. When

the lovers love is pure, the beloved needs the lover, for the reflectionof the beloveds loveliness (Ausn) in the gaze of the lover is the onlymeans by which the beloved can take nourishment from his ownbeauty. Through the full reflection of the beloveds beauty, the loverbecomes more the beloved than the beloved himself and union (wiB:l)is established between them. The lover thus becomes the beloved andall the lovers need (niy:z) is transformed into n:zthe coquetry ofone who feigns disdain for the lover. Here the duality of lover andbeloved has been bridged and the covetousness of being a lover is

abandoned such that the spiritual wayfarer is immersed in the essenceof Love and no longer deluded by love for an object. As Fakhr al-D;n6Ir:q; (d. 688/1289) writes in his Lama6:t(Flashes): Love is a fire whichwhen it falls in the heart burns all that it finds therein, to the extentthat the form of the beloved is also wiped from the heart.23 This isthe stage which al-Ghaz:l; refers to as complete detachment (tajr;d)in the singularity (tafr;d) of Love. But from the point of view of LoveItself, the lover and the beloved are both other, just like strangers,24

and have always been so; for they are necessarily marked by the

stain of duality.

22 AAmad al-Ghaz:l;, Saw:niA, ed. Pourjavady, 10 (trans., 27) (4); ed. Ritter,18 (4); ed. Rabb:n;, 161 (3).

23 Fakhr al-D;n 6Ir:q;, Lama6:t, (ed. MuAammad Kh:qav;, Tehran: Intish:r:t-iMull:, 1371 sh), 119; English trans. by W. C. Chittick and Peter LambornWilson, Fakhr ad-D;n Ir:q;: Divine Flashes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 117.(My translation.)

24 AAmad al-Ghaz:l;, Saw:niA, ed. Pourjavady, 10 (trans., 26) (4); ed. Ritter,17 (4); ed. Rabb:n;, 161 (3).

352 j os e p h e . b . l um b a r d

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2 L O VE I N SU FI L I TE RATU RE B E FO R E TH ESIXTH/TWELFTH CENTURY

As with many developments in intellectual history, all the steps that may

have preceded the expressions of love found in the Saw:niA and thelater Sufi tradition cannot be traced. Within the Islamic tradition, loveis addressed in all fields of knowledge, from belletristic literature tophilosophy, theology and even law. It must be remembered that theSufi teachings examined herein are just one dimension of an extensiveintellectual tradition. Sayings regarding love are attributed to almostall the early figures associated with the Sufi tradition. Among thosefigures who are said to have taught about love in later generations, suchas Ja6far al-4:diq, Ab< Sa6;d b. Ab; l-Khayr (d. 440/1021) and 6Abdall:h

AnB:r; of Herat (d. 481/1089), the manuscript tradition calls intoquestion the veracity of many of the sayings attributed to them. To someextent this can also be said for sayings attributed to earlier Sufis by Ab